"Treadmill" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the first night fortunately brought him in contact with a couple of grooms who had had the honour of his acquaintance when in all the radiance of his glass-blown wigged prosperity as body-coachman to the Duke of Dazzleton, and who knew nothing of the treadmill, or his subsequent career. This introduction served with his own easy assurance, and the deference country servants always pay to London ones, at once to give him standing, and it is creditable to the etiquette of servitude to say, that on joining the 'Mutton Chop ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... calf. I could feel how all those details sank into her soul, for I had not forgotten how they had sunk into mine when I came fresh from ploughing forever and forever between green aisles of corn, where, as in a treadmill, one might walk from daybreak to dusk without perceiving a shadow of change. The clean profiles of the musicians, the gloss of their linen, the dull black of their coats, the beloved shapes of the instruments, the patches of yellow light on the smooth, ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... good with regard to intellectual pleasures; the same law operates. We see men who are the flower of their age in intellect, who pass beyond their fellows and tower over them, entering at last upon a fatal treadmill of thought, where they yield to the innate indolence of the soul and begin to delude themselves by the solace of repetition. Then comes the barrenness and lack of vitality,—that unhappy and disappointing state into which great men too often enter when middle life is just passed. The fire of youth, ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... is great pressure on both mind and body; if we do not long for the success of our work, it is obvious we have missed our vocation, and it would be better for us to sweep the street, I would say it would be better to walk the treadmill than occupy our position for an hour. This I must say for myself, I am deeply thankful for having been privileged to labour in the foreign field, and consider it the highest honour which could have been conferred on me. With my brethren I have had many trials to endure, some privations to bear, some ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... not expect to hear he was in before two or three. On this account he dared not return, for never, never would he confess to her the depths of his cowardice! He therefore continued street-walking with treadmill regularity, cold, hungry, ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various
... ideal representation of the ends pursued and by felt success in attaining them, becomes a sample and anagram of all freedom. Nevertheless to arrest attention on a means is really illiberal, though not so much by what such an interest contains as by what it ignores. Happiness in a treadmill is far from inconceivable; but for that happiness to be rational the wheel should be nothing less than the whole sky from which influences can descend upon us. There would be meanness of soul in being content with a smaller sphere, so that not everything that was relevant ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... reflected with grief. "What only don't they do with you, how don't they abuse you, until you grow accustomed to everything, just like blind horses on a treadmill!" In the station house he was received by the district inspector, Kerbesh. He had spent the night on duty, had not slept his fill, and was angry. His luxurious, fan-shaped red beard was crumpled. The right half of the ruddy face was still crimsonly glowing from lying long ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... began the business of taming him by getting him used to seeing me, cultivating his acquaintance by poking my finger between the bars, talking and singing to him, and endeavoring, by other ingenious devices, to make him feel at home. He scampered around the confines of his domicile, as in a treadmill, all the time I was thus employed, and could not be induced to touch ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... shall we encourage to enter office work? Not the girl whose talent lies in making things, for to her the routine of the office will be a weary and endless treadmill entirely barren of results; nor the girl who requires the stimulus of people to keep her alert and keyed to her best work; nor the girl who cannot be happy at indoor work. Office work seems to require a temperament ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson
... present case the word is not reported—doubtless cried "Amen!" to the wisdom of the alderman. Sir PETER henceforth stands sentinel at the gate of death, and any hungry pauper who shall recklessly attempt to touch the knocker, will be sentenced to "the treadmill for a month as a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 13, 1841 • Various
... arrival at home was eagerly anticipated there, it was with a heavy heart that he prepared for what he had never ceased to look on as a treadmill life. He had enjoyed Paris, both from the society and the abstract study, since he still retained that taste for theory rather than practice, which made him prefer diseases to sick people, and all ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... his cycle and disappeared down the high road to St. Gwithian, pedalling like a squirrel on a treadmill, the tails of his new mackintosh spread like wings on the breeze. So Aunt Angela with serpentine guile had deferred her raid until the last moment and then bagged "The Limit," the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 28th, 1920 • Various
... projection in a new environment of the religious fatalism of ancestors whose God was a God of vengeance. She did not concern herself as to what all this vengeance was about; life was a trap into which all mortals walked sooner or later, and her particular trap had a treadmill,—a round of household duties she kept whirling with an energy that might have made their fortunes if she had been the head of the family. It is bad to be a fatalist unless one has an incontrovertible belief in one's destiny,—which Hannah had not. But she kept ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the sun. It is bearing the burden and heat of the day. It is intolerable weariness. It is worse than that. It is tramping round and round in the same hated steps until you cannot do anything else. You cannot think of anything else. They sound in your dreams—those treadmill steps arousing echoes of bitterness and rebellion. You cannot escape from yourself. You cannot take a vacation. You may grow rich and travel far and spend desperately, but the baleful music will follow you to the end, the music of the work you did in hate. This is the tragedy ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... parts, arising from the action of antagonistic forces, in which they endeavor to return to their natural state." Exactly. There are thousands of women in just this condition, sustained there by the daily pressure and excitement of hurry, and by a stern, unyielding "must." In the treadmill of their household labor, breakfast, dinner, and supper revolve in ceaseless course, and they must step forward to meet them. And, when more of her vitality is expended daily than is daily renewed by food and rest, woman does, actually and without any figure of speech, use herself ...
— A Domestic Problem • Abby Morton Diaz
... strangers, especially as she is not a pretty Poll, though gaudily dressed in green and yellow. If she had said, "Pretty Annie," there would have been some sense in it. See that gray squirrel at the door of the fruit-shop, whirling round and round so merrily within his wire wheel! Being condemned to the treadmill, he makes ...
— Little Annie's Ramble (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to Oxford. My brother only smiled at my fears, and remarked that being apprehended by the police would only be a small matter compared with being taken to prison and put on the treadmill, a position in which he boasted of having once been placed. When he happened to mention this to a tramp on the road, I was greatly amused to hear the tramp in a significant and confidential tone of voice quietly ask, ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... Another time she would have gone in at his request. She would, through habit, have yielded to his desire; not with any sense of submission or obedience to his compelling wishes, but unthinkingly, as we walk, move, sit, stand, go through the daily treadmill of the life which has ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... often by way of beauties of the sky. Some reasons are not far to seek. From sunset to sunrise the poet is free as he may be from the treadmill of the "common daily ways," and the high moods he tries to express are most easily symbolized by skyey images—massed clouds and sweeping lights of diamond, sapphire, amethyst; the still blue black of heaven thrilling with far stars; the purples of twilight ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... the Penitentiary was established at Bellevue. In 1816, a portion of the almshouse was set apart for the punishment of felons, by the institution of the treadmill. This was on Twenty-sixth street, near First avenue, the present site of Bellevue Hospital, and its part occupancy as a prison somewhat relieved the overcrowded condition of the jail. The city jail still continued in City Hall Park, and was used as a debtors' prison, remaining so ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... be had upon no easier terms than privation and work. But there is a wide difference between a man toiling to gain material comforts for those who are dear to him, or laboring to enlighten and reform his own spirit that he may give good gifts to his generation, and a beast whipped round a treadmill to the din of its own everlasting clatter. It is only work whose end shall, in some faint degree, be intelligible, which is demanded for the child; and with this sort of work we believe that it is very possible to furnish ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... negotiations, Cabinet Councils—perchance, long and not easy discussion of details, settlement of differences, composure of all those personal frictions and collisions which are inevitable in the treadmill of political life. Yes; it was the case of the actor-manager with the thousand and one details of outside work to attend to, as well as the great and swelling piece of magnificent work for which the great outside world alone cared—of which it alone knew. To ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... you I did not believe the man lived who was such an unmitigated cynical brute as to profess and act upon such principles, and I would willingly agree to any law which would send him to the treadmill. ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... spent almost all his time at the Casino, working out and experimenting with different systems. He had come to no decision as to how he should order his future life, and until he had formulated some scheme he found that he could only stop the hideous treadmill of his thoughts by focussing his whole attention on the crazy gyrations ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... chance of escaping it. She tried to feel that, though she could not be saved without something which the God of perfect love could give her if he pleased, but might not please to give her, yet if she was not saved it would be all her own fault: and so ever the round of a great miserable treadmill of contradictions! For a moment she would be able to say this or that she thought she ought to say; the next the feeling would be gone, and she as miserable as before. Her friend made no attempt to imbue her with her own calm indifference, nor could she have succeeded ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... business world. The business woman understands human nature, and therefore can deal successfully with the butcher, the baker and other tradespeople. She has a power of adapting herself to new conditions which is impossible to her sister accustomed only to the narrow treadmill ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... so confident that such a one as Mr. Browborough could have been returned to Parliament by none other than corrupt means! In his present mood he would have been almost glad to see Mr. Browborough at the treadmill, and would have thought six months' solitary confinement quite inadequate to the offence. "I never read anything in my life that disgusted me so much," he said ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... to,' rejoined Master Bardell, 'I'm a-goin' to have some, I am.' Cheered by this prospect, the precocious boy applied himself to his infantile treadmill, with increased vigour. ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... take in several individuals at once and to have installed apparatus and working machinery requiring larger space than that furnished by any of the other calorimeters. Near the chair calorimeter a special calorimeter with treadmill is shortly ...
— Respiration Calorimeters for Studying the Respiratory Exchange and Energy Transformations of Man • Francis Gano Benedict
... unselfishness, the affectionate give-and-take of a big family. She knew what miracles the loving patience of her mother daily performed. She knew the selflessness of her father, which kept him at the treadmill of his profession that his children might have an education, might have their chance. Hospitality, kindness, love; these were of the very ...
— The Cricket • Marjorie Cooke
... the sphere of Invention, and is destined to teach her many more; and the fact that her Carriages are condemned as too light and her Pianos as too heavy, her Reaping Machines as "a cross between a treadmill and a flying chariot," &c., &c., by critics very superficially acquainted with their uses, and who have barely glanced at them in passing, proves nothing but the rashness and hostility of their contemners. From such unworthy ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... sometimes performed by the men when their women are preoccupied. At one time when an American wished two or three bushels of palay threshed, as horse food for the trail, three Bontoc men performed the work in the classic treadmill manner. They spread a mat on the earth, covered it with palay, and then tread, or rather "rubbed," out the kernels with their bare feet. They often scraped up the mass with their feet, bunching it and rubbing it in a way that strongly ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... times of torture were mercifully rare. Her heart seemed numb—she worked too hard to think much—at night she was too dead tired to spend the hours in fruitless anguish and tears. Her life went on in a sort of treadmill existence; and until the coming of Inez Catheron nothing had occurred ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... counted the regular people I went to count the little people. I took a spade and spaded off the top of their town to get in. But they put an encanto on me, and made me and Mula run a treadmill for ...
— Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas • Raphael Aloysius Lafferty
... and delightful of Euripidean dramas, as well as, by modern standards, the most easily actable. And I notice that many judges who display nothing but a fierce satisfaction in sending other plays of that author to the block or the treadmill, show a certain human weakness in sentencing ...
— Alcestis • Euripides
... the treadmill," he said to himself, grimly; and it was then, as he started for the head of the pier, that he first ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... I was walking seven and eight miles a day, and doing extra work before and after school hours, and my health began to fail. Those were years I do not like to look back upon—years in which life had degenerated into a treadmill whose monotony was broken only by the grim messages from the front. My sister Mary married and went to Big Rapids to live. I had no time to dream my dream, but the star of my one purpose still glowed in my dark horizon. It seemed that nothing short of a miracle could ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... has infinite uses; from China it sounds the "call for prayer," and lo, the Book of Dividends opens at the right text. Were Bull ever caught in the act, and put from the trade of international opium-dosing to that of picking oakum and the treadmill we should hear him exclaim, as he went out of sight, "Behold me weaving the threads of democratic destiny as I climb ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement
... of the Bible, he designated as inferior in value to the Holy Scriptures, but useful and good to read. Well might he sigh at times over the work. In November 1532, being then wholly engrossed with the book of Sirach, he wrote to his friend Amsdorf saying that he hoped to escape from this treadmill in three weeks, but no one can discover any trace of weariness or vexation in the German idiom in which he clothed the proverbs and apophthegms of this book. Notwithstanding the length of time which his task occupied, and his constant interruptions, it has ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... in his great solicitude to make the best appointments? We have talent enough in the South to officer millions of men. Mr. Walker is a man of capacity, and has a most extraordinary recollection of details. But I fear his nerves are too finely strung for the official treadmill. I heard him say yesterday, with a sigh, that no gentleman can be fit for office. Well, Mr. Walker is a gentleman by education and instincts; and is fastidiously tenacious of what is due a gentleman. Will his official life be a long one? I know ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... perfect ease. "And the young fool does not know where to go for a crust of bread," thought he. "Ah, if there were no Flavia, no Champdoce;" then, speaking aloud, he resumed, "don't fancy, my dear boy, that I wish to condemn you to the treadmill that I am compelled to pass my life in. I have other views for you, far more worthy of your merits. I have taken a great liking to you, and I will do all I can to further your ambitious views. I was thinking a great deal of you, ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... patchwork, knitting stockings, making articles of plain needlework, washing, ironing, housework, cooking, spinning, and weaving. It should in all cases be constant, and in the worst cases, disciplinary labor. She recommends, under strict limitations, the treadmill for hardened, refractory, and depraved women, but only for short periods. All needleworkers especially should receive some remuneration for their work, which remuneration should be allowed to accumulate for their benefit by such time as their sentences expire, in order ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... to the highway, and here an irrigating machine[1] was raising water for the fields. Two men stood on the treadmill beside the large-bucketed wheel, and as they continued their endless walk the water dashed up into the trough and went splashing down the ditches into the thirsty gardens. The workers were tall, bronze-skinned Libyans, who were stripped to the waist, showing their splendid chests ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... violently. "I say, old chap, what would you have gained by overtaking the lady?" Cintras sniffed; Berkeley laughingly remarked that the staircase reminded him of the sort you see at a harvest with a horse on the treadmill. ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... endless stitching, gripping a locomotive lever, pushing the plow, tending the stock, doing the chores, tiresome examination papers; and all the rest of the endless, endless, doing, day by day, of the commonplace treadmill things, that must be done, that fill out the day of the great majority of human lives. This one whom we are following unseen is doing quietly, cheerily his daily round, with a bit of sunshine in his face, a light in his eye, and lightness in his step, and the commonplace place ...
— Quiet Talks on Prayer • S. D. (Samuel Dickey) Gordon
... The treadmill continued until Arithelli would have welcomed an accident as a break in the grinding monotony. The exercise instead of making her hot, had made her shiver as if with great cold. She felt as if she had been practising for days instead of hours. It was of no ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... sail the air like a gull; a mechanical chariot that would go twenty miles an hour on a smooth road without horses; and a plan of mathematics which would quickly and simply enable us to compute and express fractions. We also hear of his inventing a treadmill chariot, which carried the horse on board the vehicle, but the horse once ran away and attained such a velocity in the streets of Stockholm that people declared the whole thing was a diabolical invention, and in deference ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... a treadmill here. Perhaps by the time you come on in December I will be able to report something accomplished. But oh! the misery of dealing with people who are eternally suspicious and have no sense of ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... own room, that's vice, you can't touch me; if I take an extra glass for the first time in my life, and knock down the watchman, that's a crime which, if I am rich, costs me one pound—perhaps five pounds; if I am poor, sends me to the treadmill. If I break the hearts of five hundred old fathers, by buying with gold or flattery the embraces of five hundred young daughters, that's vice,—your servant, Mr. World! If one termagant wench scratches ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 5 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... us in anything but our own actions; and they will become more and more meaningless to us as they become more and more wilful, until at last we shall be to ourselves like squirrels in a cage, or prisoners on a universal treadmill. Years ago the war must have seemed a meaningless treadmill to the Germans, but they cannot escape from its consequences; they have done and they must suffer. But will they learn from their sufferings, shall we all learn, ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... old days when a woman's hours were from 5 A.M. to 5 A.M., we did not hear much of discontent among women, because they had not time to even talk, and certainly could not get together. The horse on the treadmill may be very discontented, but he is not disposed to tell his troubles, for he cannot ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... in their finery; or pet pussy-cats, whom they fondle into wearing spectacles and feeding on macaroones, instead of pursuing their avocations as honest mousers. The favourite author of the circulating libraries has a great deal to envy in the treadmill! ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... more year: there is no return. Press onward, still onward, for weal or woe. Beat heart: throb brain: hot eyelids burn: Man's troubles and trials who cares to know? Birth, marriage, and death: death, marriage, and birth, Are the treadmill steps of this wheel of strife; Cloak, draught, and a crust—then a hole in the earth: And the struggle for these is the ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... please, a poor devil chained in the treadmill of the capitalist system—a "soda-jerker", a "counter-jumper", a book-keeper for the Steel Trust. His chances of rising in life are one in ten thousand; but he comes to the Metaphysical Library, and pays the price of his dinner for a pamphlet by Henry Harrison Brown, who was first a Unitarian ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... come at the right moment. As far as the move to Chicago was concerned, Ernestine rather welcomed the change: hers had been a monotonous treadmill in one environment. She was ready for a venture in a new city, and curious about Chicago, of which Milly had talked a great deal. But above all, the conclusive reason for her consent was Milly—her affections. She could not lose her family, cost what it might to keep them. ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... from Henry Ford, "especially those employed in offices, fall into a routine way of doing their work that eventually makes it become like a treadmill. They do not get a broad view of the entire business. Sometimes that is the fault of the employer, but that does not excuse the young man. Those who command attention are the ones who are actually pushing the boss.... It pays to ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... him with her meditative eyes, so darkly lovely, yet never quite to lose their individual difference from any other lovely eyes I have ever seen. The eyes, I thought then and still think, of one who has seen more, or at least seen into farther spaces, than most of treadmill-trotting humanity. She wore one of the new frocks for which Phillida and she had already made a flying trip to town; a most sophisticated frock from Fifth Avenue, with frivolous French shoes to correspond. Her hair of a Lorelei was demurely coiled and wound about her little head. Yet some ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... election crowds. In those taverns the old fashion prevailed of roasting great joints of meat on a turnspit before an open fire; and to keep the spit turning before the heat little dogs were trained to work in a sort of treadmill cage. ...
— The Quaker Colonies - A Chronicle of the Proprietors of the Delaware, Volume 8 - in The Chronicles Of America Series • Sydney G. Fisher
... returned the banker, unheeding the courtesy conveyed in the last sentence, "I do not care three straws—I know enough of the law to know that if she have rich friends in this town, and you have none, she will be protected and you will go to the treadmill." ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... time that summer was spent in improving forty acres of his farm, on which he raised some sod corn and vegetables, Our corn for bread was ground in Mr. Wigglesworth's treadmill, turned by-oxen. We had no fruit for many years, but a few wild sorts, and the vegetables were a welcome variation in our ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... our poor Warwickshire Peasant, who rose to be Manager of a Playhouse, so that he could live without begging; whom the Earl of Southampton cast some kind glances on; whom Sir Thomas Lucy, many thanks to him, was for sending to the Treadmill! We did not account him a god, like Odin, while he dwelt with us;—on which point there were much to be said. But I will say rather, or repeat: In spite of the sad state Hero-worship now lies in, consider what this Shakespeare has actually become among us. Which Englishman we ever made, in ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... them, while the gunners would keep up an incessant fire. Striking as this plan appeared, the emperor doubted its practicability. Imitation steamships had been attempted already; but though they looked quite like the foreign ones, they would not move: the paddles had to be turned like a treadmill. Another great suggestion, was to march 300,000 men right through the Russian territories to London, and put a stop to all further operations by ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 433 - Volume 17, New Series, April 17, 1852 • Various
... of action when, with lamplight gloating o'er the scene, I bask at leisure in my den, and read my fav'rite magazine. And so all day I stay at home attending to the treadmill grind; but when night comes afar I roam, and leave the ...
— Rippling Rhymes • Walt Mason
... said the Owl, 'for the culture of feeble moral principles that the Struggle for Existtence has been too much for. They are a wonderful system. The weak morality is supplied with bread and water and a cell to develop in, and it is exercised on a treadmill, and allowed to expand and pick oakum, and so it is turned into a ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... will, and in a short time ruined all her friends and acquaintance; not even sparing those to whom, on her death-bed, she had recommended the care of her funeral, but condemning one of them, a man of equestrian rank, to the treadmill. [352] ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... a provincial university in the north of France not long ago, I saw a peasant mother standing in the misty morning at the mouth of a small thresher, feeding into it the sheaves handed her by her husband, the horse in a treadmill furnishing the power. When I passed in the misty morning of the next day she was still feeding the yellow sheaves into the thresher; and I thought how much better ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... appeared to be a most lonely and languishing place of incarceration. We inspected the cells, and observed in one of them a peculiar handle fastened against the wall. This proved to be a West Indian substitute for the treadmill. The turning of the handle can be made easy or difficult by an arrangement of screws without the cell. The affair is set for a certain number of revolutions, and a warder explained to us that where hard labour has been meted to a prisoner, he spends long, weary hours ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... she was glad, although he reflected that her process of putting money back into the bank as fast as he drew it out would be about as effectual as the efforts of a squirrel in a little wire treadmill! ...
— Skinner's Dress Suit • Henry Irving Dodge
... a moon. Day and night I am held in the grip of one besetting thought, to write, write, write! Hardly have I finished one book than something urges me to write another, and then a third, and then a fourth—I write ceaselessly. I am, as it were, on a treadmill. I hurry for ever from one story to another, and can't help myself. Do you see anything bright and beautiful in that? Oh, it is a wild life! Even now, thrilled as I am by talking to you, I do not forget ...
— The Sea-Gull • Anton Checkov
... children to be members of a society better than ours, whilst the "right to work" only means the right to be always a wage-slave, a drudge, ruled over and exploited by the middle class of the future. The right to well-being is the Social Revolution, the right to work means nothing but the Treadmill of Commercialism. It is high time for the worker to assert his right to the common inheritance, and to enter into ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... Solon's invitation he followed the negro into what had been called the engine-room, though to Winn's eye it looked as little like an engine-room as any place he had ever known. At one side was a horse-power treadmill, such as he had often seen used for the sawing of wood. Half of it was sunk below the level of the deck, and covered with a removable floor. It was geared in the most direct and simple manner to a shaft that disappeared ...
— Raftmates - A Story of the Great River • Kirk Munroe
... of purpose these modern students are, I thought to myself. In my time we used to go back to college as to a treadmill. ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... been transferred from the earth to Mars, the new conditions of life could scarcely have been more different from the old than was life in Portman Square married to Nelson Smith, from the treadmill as Mrs. Ellsworth's slave-companion. What the Portman Square experiences of the bride would have been if Knight had allowed the Annesley-Setons to begin by ruling it would be dangerous to say. But he had taken his stand; and without guessing that she owed her freedom of action to her husband's ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... principle already stated applies. The way to learn to write is by writing; not just by the dreary treadmill of practicing upon formal "compositions," but by having something to write that one cares to express. The written language lessons should, therefore, always grow out of the real interests and activities of the child in the home, ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts
... us see how this personal affiliation of pianola and pianolist, of instrument and player, has been worked out, so that the player is not a mere human treadmill pumping air into a cabinet on castors, but—whether he be a lawyer, merchant, financier, dressmaker, milliner, or society leader; one of the Four Hundred or one of the eighty million—a musical artist ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... "Your Mrs. Treadmill, she's all right. Sapps Court's all right of itself. But it ain't the Court I was tracking out. If it was, they'd have known the name of Daverill. Why—the place ain't no bigger than a prison yard! About the ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... want time, time, time. For it is a sad fact that sight-seeing as commonly done is one of the most wearying things in the world, and takes the life out of any but the sturdiest or the most elastic natures more efficiently than would a reasonable amount of daily exercise on a treadmill. In my younger days I used to find that a visit to the gallery of the Louvre was followed by more fatigue and exhaustion than the same amount of time spent in walking the wards of ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... on his circle about the boy, and Dick turned slowly with him, always facing the eyes that faced him. He could dimly make out the shape of a rifle at the saddlebow, but the Sioux did not raise it, he merely rode on in that ceaseless treadmill tramp, and Dick wondered what he meant to do. Was he waiting for the others to ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... They were stationary, and it was necessary to bring the sheaves to them. The seventh patent issued by the United States, to Samuel Mulliken of Philadelphia, was for a threshing machine. The portable horse-power treadmill, invented in 1830 by Hiram A. and John A. Pitts of Winthrop, Maine, was presently coupled with a thresher, or "separator," and this outfit, with its men and horses, moving from farm to farm, soon became an autumn feature of every neighborhood. The treadmill was later on succeeded—by ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson
... barrel-stave; nor put live crabs into his pocket, nor dead dog-fish into his well; yea, even when judgment, too long provoked, made bare her red right hand, and the lieutenant vowed by his commission that he would send half-a-dozen of them to the treadmill, they would send up a deputation to "beg Captain Willis to beg the schoolmistress to beg them off." For between Willis and that fair young creature a friendship had grown up, easily to be understood. Willis was one ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... more and more evident to me that the ideal of freedom has grown tenuous in the atmosphere of the West. The mentality is that of a slave-owning community, with a mutilated multitude of men tied to its commercial and political treadmill. It is the mentality of mutual distrust and fear. The appalling scenes of inhumanity and injustice, which are growing familiar to us, are the outcome of a psychology that deals with terror. No cruelty can be uglier in its ferocity than the cruelty of the coward. The people who have sacrificed ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... Russia I would issue a special edict expelling fleas from my dominions and ordering that the labor expended in scratching should be devoted to agriculture or the mechanic arts. I suggested that the engines should be removed from the Ingodah and a treadmill erected for the fleas to propel the boat. There have been exhibitions where fleas were trained to draw microscopic coaches and perform other fantastic tricks; but whatever their ability I would wager that the insects on that steamboat could not be outdone in industry by any ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... sunshine. All the fundamental qualities called patience, perseverance, courage, fidelity, are the gains of drudgery. Character comes with commonplaces. Greatness is through tasks that have become insipid, and by duties that are irksome. The treadmill is a divine teacher. He who shovels sand year in and year out needs not our pity, for the proverb is "Every man has his own sand heap." The greatest mind, fulfilling its career, once the freshness has worn off, pursues a hackneyed task and finds the duties irksome. It is better so. A seer ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... saw him every morning, in the carpet slippers he wore in the house and the black clothes no tailor could make really fit his gaunt, bony frame, was a homely enough figure. The routine of his life was simple, too; it would have seemed a treadmill to most of us. He was an early riser, when I came on duty at eight in the morning, he was often already dressed and reading in the library. There was a big table near the centre of the room: there I have seen him reading ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... Navajo women was not a chivalrous concession on the part of the men, but proceeded simply from the lack of occasion for the exercise of their selfish propensities. No one would be so foolish as to say that even the most savage Indian would put his squaw into the treadmill merely for the fun of seeing her toil. He makes a drudge of her in order to save himself the trouble of working. Now the Navajos were rich enough to employ slaves; their labor, says Major Backus, was "mostly performed by the ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... was no more than a veneer and that his freer self still lived, but in confinement. At least he felt the great lack in his life, which had been given too much to the piling up of things, to the sustaining of position—getting and spending. Yet he could see no end. He was caught in the rich man's treadmill, only less horrible than that of the poor man with its cold ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... is given to woman, it will be necessary to punish bribery with the treadmill, for no "person" will regard it as a crime to barter away her vote for a year's schooling for Johnny or a new frock for Maud. Nothing tells more plainly the difference between the Old World and the New than the constant returns home during war. We can hardly conceive Pericles or ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... with the sea since that day. But let us go on, or we'll never get through with this story, any more than the Flying Dutchman will get into port, though he keeps on beating up and down forever; and as for to-day, why, we'll leave off just where we began, like thieves in a treadmill, if we don't get ...
— Cast Away in the Cold - An Old Man's Story of a Young Man's Adventures, as Related by Captain John Hardy, Mariner • Isaac I. Hayes
... For hours and hours I walked, muttering and cursing, my teeth chattering in my head, my brain on fire, my feet slushing in my soaking boots. I did not know clearly where I was, I did not know why I was walking nor where, but walk I must, like the convicts on the treadmill. Something laughed horribly in the air just behind me and said like a parrot, ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... my dear fellow? Now you get upon your treadmill of business, and you must keep going, or break your legs. Think, too, of the jolly little rascals you have left! The beggars are the only aristocracy we have,—the only people who enjoy their dolce far niente. Look on the Common: who are ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... she thought her city cousins really missed a good deal of enjoyment, in never, by any chance, employing themselves in anything of the kind, even when the busy servants were really over-worked. Indeed it is somewhat surprising that domestics go on as contentedly as they do in their constant treadmill of labour, often too much for their strength, when so many healthy members of the families for whose benefit they toil spend so large a portion of their time in luxurious idleness, or ...
— Lucy Raymond - Or, The Children's Watchword • Agnes Maule Machar
... we know all about that. Put an old man in prison for a week because he looks into his 'ay-field on a Sunday; or send a young one to the treadmill for two months because he knocks over a 'are! All them cases ought to be tried in the towns, and there should be beaks paid as there is in London. I don't see the good of a country gentleman. Buying and selling;—that's what the world has to ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... usually so lively and brave, did not in the least feel himself at home; he acted as if he were walking on peas, over a slippery floor. How long and wearisome the time appeared; it was like being in a treadmill. And then they went out for a walk, which was very slow and tedious. Two steps forward and one backwards had Rudy to take to keep pace with the others. They walked down to Chillon, and went over the old castle ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... labor and many hard years for the woman, and with the same number of years and as little labor as he could manage on the man's part, they tamed the Cove and made it a beauty spot in that wild land. A beauty spot, though their lives held nothing but treadmill toil and harsh words and a mental horizon narrowed almost to the limits of the grim, gray, rock wall that ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... Ser Perth let Dave consider it. But it was too much to accept at once, and Dave's mind was a treadmill. He'd agreed to admit anything, but some of this was such complete nonsense that his mind rejected it automatically. Yet he was sure Ser Perth was serious; there was no humor on the face of the prissy ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey
... that he was hurting her, but his insurgent youth demanded its right of speech after long repression. "I'm a man," he cried, "and I want to do a man's work in the world and take a man's place. Just because my ancestors chose to slave in a treadmill, I don't have to stay in it, do I? You have no right to keep me ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... quite an inventive person, had patented the treadmill mechanism to represent horse-racing on the stage, a device which was afterward used with such great effect in "Ben-Hur." He was so much impressed with it that he had a play written around it ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... explain Puzzelli or Donald M'Leod. Later Lamb sent Wilson, who seems to have asked for some verse about Defoe, the "Ode to the Treadmill," but ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... a good cigar, he found a new interest in the letters and documents left there for his consideration. After all, life was a game. Even the early red men had their sport. Modern routine work without diversion was a treadmill, prisonlike existence. Delbridge was the happy medium. The jovial speculator had never heard of such a fine-spun thing as a conscience. What if Irene and Buckton were having their fun; could he not also enjoy ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... checker-board of its ground-plan. Market Street flew off at a tangent and set all the south portion of the town at an angle that is rather a relief than anything else that I know of. Who wants to go on forever up one street and down another, and then across town at right angles, as if life were a treadmill and there were no hope of change until the great ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... would be, when it should come, free of its tasks and obligations; no longer in the treadmill making her world go round, but given ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... wished to marry him that she might help him in his life's labor?—But she had thought the work was to be something greater, which she could serve in devoutly for its own sake. Was it right, even to soothe his grief—would it be possible, even if she promised—to work as in a treadmill fruitlessly? ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... that ladder I will never know. The first ten feet out in front was agony. Then we passed through the lanes in our barbed wire. I knew I was running, but could feel no motion below the waist. Patches on the ground seemed to float to the rear as if I were on a treadmill and scenery was rushing past me. The Germans had put a barrage of shrapnel across No Man's Land, and you could hear the pieces ...
— Over The Top • Arthur Guy Empey
... villany of this world. Certain Alguazils—very like some other Alguazils that I know nearer home—having stood by quietly to see the friendless stranger insulted and assaulted, now felt it their duty to apprehend the poor nun for murderous violence: and had there been such a thing as a treadmill in Valladolid, Kate was booked for a place on it without further inquiry. Luckily, injustice does not always prosper. A gallant young cavalier, who had witnessed from his windows the whole affair, had seen the provocation, and admired Catalina's ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... with due recognition of his good figure, his strong muscles, his handsome, boyish face, with its cluster of chestnut hair and steady grey eyes. All that, he knew, wanted life, animation, movement. At twenty-three he was longing for something to take him out of the treadmill round in which he had been fixed for five years. He had no taste for handing out money in exchange for cheques, in posting up ledgers, in writing dull, formal letters. He would have been much happier with an old flannel shirt, open at the throat, a pick in his hands, making ...
— The Chestermarke Instinct • J. S. Fletcher
... filly's education went on and prospered. She marched discreetly along the roads in long reins; she champed detested mouthfuls of rusty mouthing bit in the process described by Johnny Connolly as "getting her neck broke"; she trotted for treadmill half-hours in the lunge; and during and in spite of all these penances, she fattened up and thickened out until that great authority, Mr. Alexander, pronounced it would be a sin not to send her up to the Dublin Horse ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... medium, chance insisted on enlarging Henry Adams's education by tossing a trio of Virginians as little fitted for it as Sioux Indians to a treadmill. By some further affinity, these three outsiders fell into relation with the Bostonians among whom Adams as a schoolboy belonged, and in the end with Adams himself, although they and he knew well how thin an edge of friendship ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... never yet heard to say to wife, or child, or servant that he was pleased. He never says that a meal is to his taste or a seat set so as to shelter and repose him. The obstinate man makes his house a very prison and treadmill to himself and to all those who are condemned to suffer with him. And all the time it is not that he does not love and honour his household; but by an evil law of the obstinate heart its worst obstinacy and mulishness comes out among those ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... going a commonplace, treadmill sort of grind, in a small corner of some great manufacturing concern, and be at the same time carrying on a bigger enterprise than the president of his concern. For he may be planning and praying for a world, and actually lifting it up ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... these useful servants. Truly, there is great need for the refining, civilizing, and uplifting influence of the gospel here in the city where it had its earliest proclamation. I also visited two grist mills operated by horses on a treadmill, which was a large wooden wheel turned on its side, so the horses could stand on it. I was not pleased with the nearness of the manure in one of these mills to the material from which the "staff of life" ...
— A Trip Abroad • Don Carlos Janes
... whir of many sewing-machines, worked by the sweater's slaves with weary feet and aching backs, drowned every feeble note of joy that struggled to make itself heard above the noise of the great treadmill. ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... From this Giottesque treadmill, painting was released by the intervention of another art. The painters were hopelessly mediocre; their art was snatched from them by the sculptors. Orcagna himself, perhaps the only Giottesque who gave painting an onward push, had modelled and ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... laughed, grimly, staring up at her. "I'm not his sort. There are no heroics about me. Men of my stamp don't make theatrical exits; we're too confoundedly sane. Whether we do well or whether we do ill, we plod along on our treadmill round, from the house to the office, and from the office to the grave, as if we never had anything on the conscience. But if I had the spirit of Bienville, do you know what ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... my want of curiosity reminds me that on this very occasion Charles Greville offered to take me all over the Coldbath Fields Prison, and show me the delights of the treadmill, etc., and expressed great astonishment that I did not enthusiastically accept this opportunity of seeing such a cheerful spectacle, and still more amazement at my general want of enlightened curiosity, which he appeared to consider ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... grave or gay, Before us at his bidding come The Treadmill tramp, the One-Horse Shay, The dumb despair of ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... mental initiative. In play the child makes his own plans, his imagination has free rein, originality is in demand, and constructive ability is placed under tribute. Here are developed a thousand tendencies which would never find expression in the narrow treadmill of labor alone. The child needs to learn to work; but along with his work must be the opportunity for free and unrestricted activity, which can come only through play. The boy needs a chance to be a barbarian, a hero, an Indian. He needs to ride his broomstick on a dangerous raid, and to charge ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... as with the rest of us. So that first day ended, and so every day has gone on since. What she suffers, she suffers in solitude and silence; only her worn face, haggard cheeks, and hollow eyes tell. She goes through the usual routine of life with treadmill regularity, and is growing as thin as a shadow. She neither eats, nor sleeps, nor complains; and she is killing herself by inches. We are worried to-death about her; and yet we are afraid to say one word in her hearing. Come to us, Frank; you are a physician, and though you cannot "minister ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... on with her footsteps till the operation became monotonous. Still that roadless scene was unmoved. The world was "round like an apple"; that she could plainly see. And as to her feelings, this globe was just a big treadmill under ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... carried heavy loads of brick on their shoulders to the masons on the walls. Of course the sheep suffered for lack of care. The children also pined from neglect. Life for the Hebrews became a grinding treadmill of ...
— Hebrew Life and Times • Harold B. Hunting
... if, by being "bad," they can snatch a personal advantage without anybody being any the wiser. "Life would be endurable if it were not for its pleasures," they declare in the face of a pile of social invitations. Yet they still endure that treadmill of entertainments which makes up a London season, only showing their real feelings by moaning to themselves in the process. They freely acknowledge that very few of these entertainments really entertain, but to miss being ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... instrument, tambourine, violin or zither, is practised for several hours in a little stuffy room filled with three or four dozen obviously unwashed humans, reeking with bad tobacco and worse absinthe, and pervaded by the ghosts of inferior meals, it becomes more penitential than the treadmill. A dog's life, said Paragot. Whereat Narcisse sniffed. It was not at all the life for a ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... and has never remedied anything since the world began. Wickedness is nearly always, perhaps always, a moral invalidism, and we shall see some day that to punish men for crime by being cruel to them is like condemning a man to the treadmill for having typhoid fever. I can only say that the more I have known of human beings, and the older I grow, the more lovable, gentle, sweet-tempered I have found them ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... had had dimples when she came, she would have lost them ere this," said Mrs. Middleton with unusual energy. "She's been put right into a treadmill, Jack. Only sixteen, sweet sixteen, and she hasn't had any of the gayety a young girl wants and needs, but has just slaved from morning until night ever since she came to us. At her age, she ought ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... wish of that sort," she replied, hastily; "I could not quite bring myself to play with children in the nursery." I suppose mother had told her about the dolls. "Well, we both start on our separate treadmill ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... immediate intention and ultimate object of their lives. The daily routine of ordinary working, feeding and sleeping existence, varied by little social conventions and obligations which form a kind of break to the persistent monotony of the regular treadmill round, should be, they think, sufficient for any sane, well-balanced, self-respecting creature,—and if a man or woman elects to stand out of the common ruck and say: "I refuse to live in a chaos of uncertainties—I will endeavour to know why my particular atom of self ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... Finis to the final chapter of Romance, voting the world a dull place and life a treadmill, anathematizing in no uncertain terms his lack of resource and address, Maitland paid off his cabby, alighted, and to that worthy's boundless wonder, walked into the waiting-room of the railway terminus without deviating a hair's-breadth from the straight and circumscribed ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... rift i' th' wall, Accepts God's dole of good or evil fate, And from the sky's just helmet draws its lot Daily of shower or sunshine, cold or hot;— Whether the closer captive of a creed, Cooped up from birth to grind out endless chaff, Sees through his treadmill-bars the noonday laugh, And feels in vain, his crumpled pinions breed;— Whether the Georgian slave look up and mark, With bellying sails puffed full, the tall cloud-bark Sink northward slowly,—thou alone seem'st good, Fair only thou, O Freedom, whose desire ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... consciousness of doing some good in the world. Oh, it is impossible for you to realize anything of the longing in woman's heart to be someone, to do something, and so to be relieved from the everlasting monotony of the treadmill, which, if men were obliged to submit to it, would make the majority of ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... other said, who was herself of the very Highest Church faction, and made the cupboard in her room into an oratory, and fasted on every Friday in the year. Their paternal house of Drummington, Foker could very seldom be got to visit. He swore he had rather go on the treadmill than stay there. He was not much beloved by the inhabitants. Lord Erith, Lord Rosherville's heir, considered his cousin a low person, of deplorably vulgar habits and manners; while Foker, and with equal reason, voted Erith a ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the fence and advanced toward where he had heard the voice of the colored man. In a little clearing he saw him. Eradicate was presiding over a portable sawmill, worked by a treadmill, on the incline of which was the mule, its ears laid back, and an unmistakable expression of ...
— Tom Swift and his Motor-cycle • Victor Appleton
... treadmill life, and believe I'm destined to better things. If I could only get a good position in the army or navy, the world would hear from me. They say money opens every door, and mother must open some ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... up for old age, except by the most painful economy and daily scrimping; and how can the children consent to stay on, starving body and soul? That explains the 3,318 abandoned farms in Maine at present. And the farmers' wives! what monotonous, treadmill lives! Constant toil with no wages, no allowance, no pocket money, no vacations, no pleasure trips to the city nearest them, little of the pleasures of correspondence; no time to write, unless a near relative is dead or dying. Some one says that their only chance for ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn
... proud and ambitious; that's true, and I'm glad of it. I am discontented, because I can't help feeling that there is a better sort of life than this dull one made up of everlasting work, with no object but money. I can't starve my soul for the sake of my body, and I mean to get out of the treadmill if I can. I'm proud, as you call it, because I hate dependence where there isn't any love to make it bearable. You don't say so in words, but I know you begrudge me a home, though you will call me ungrateful when I'm ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott |
